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Well, my pc was dying yesterday so I was making a bootable usb stick on my dad's laptop.
But now the laptop doesn't recognise windows vista anymore! It just wants to boot xp from the usb disk but that doesn't work either.
Soon, after that, my pc died, so now I'm pissed and my dad is pissed (on me).

Any ideas on solving this? I mainly want to repair the laptop, I wanted to buy new parts for my pc anyway.
Any help would be great.

But now the laptop doesn't recognise windows vista anymore! It just wants to boot xp from the usb disk...

Click to expand...

... I'm sorry if this sounds kind of obvious, but you have unplugged the USB stick before turning the laptop on, right?

Otherwise, you haven't given us enough information about how far the PC actually gets while it tries to start up. What actually happens when you turn it on, does it get as far as a windows logo screen?

Try this to fix the missing hall.dll
* Boot from your XP Setup CD. You have to use a XP disc as the recovery console is not included on Vista discs and enter the Recovery Console
* Run "Attrib -H -R -S" on the C:\Boot.ini file
* Delete the C:\Boot.ini file
* Run "Bootcfg /Rebuild"
* Run Fixboot

So now my pc works again, I don't know for how long.
I think the problem with my pc was that the HDDs were in RAID, and one is broken.
So I installed xp again, lost every file I had, but both drives were 320gb, and now I have more then that, but not as much as 640gb...
Also, the drives were making weird noises before they broke, and now their making them again!
*Sigh* Maybe I need to buy a new hard disk..

Quoted from Lee79:

Try this to fix the missing hall.dll
* Boot from your XP Setup CD. You have to use a XP disc as the recovery console is not included on Vista discs and enter the Recovery Console
* Run "Attrib -H -R -S" on the C:\Boot.ini file
* Delete the C:\Boot.ini file
* Run "Bootcfg /Rebuild"
* Run Fixboot